THE P RTAL
August 2014
Page 24
What are Church
Schools for?
Stimulated by the current debate
about Christianity in Church Schools,
Geoffrey Kirk makes his own contribution
A
priest friend
recently regaled me with an amusing story. It concerned a Catholic Primary
School somewhere in the North East. It appears that the authorities of the diocese were concerned when
a survey of the pupils revealed that 75% were Muslim and that the same was true of the teaching staff. What
to do? After lengthy debate a solution was found: the school was handed over to the Church of England.
Apochryphal? I hope so. But not improbable.
Religious assemblies lay open an
opportunity for children to worship
Step forward John Pritchard, the CofE’s ‘open
evangelical’ Bishop of Oxford and Chair of its Board
of Education. Bishop Pritchard is of the opinion that
the time has come to jettison the requirement of the
1944 Education Act that each school day should begin
with a ‘broadly Christian’ act of worship.
Worship, he quite rightly says, is an essentially
voluntary act – it is a motion of the heart and will
and can never be compulsory. But that is no reason
to abandon morning worship. Religious assembles,
whether in Church or State schools, do not force
children to worship; they lay open an opportunity to
do so.
They are a daily opportunity to consider the
dimensions of wonder, mystery and adoration
which are otherwise absent from the dumbed-down
curriculum of modern life. Of course, as the bishop the causes for which
says, they will often be done badly; but that is no matrimony was ordained
Let us, then, be clear what Catholic Schools are
argument for giving them up entirely.
for. They are to give a sound, modern and rounded
the original ideals of the
education to their pupils; but they also exist to coNational Society have got lost
operate with parents and godparents in the solemn
At a time when Islamic entryism is a concern in obligations (on which they entered in the baptismal
some areas and some schools, such a statement by a rite) to rear children in the Faith.
spokesman of the Church of England seems curiously
ill-timed. What, I wonder, does Pritchard think should
The communication of the Faith is an integral part
happen in the church’s own schools? And how long of pro-creation itself. It is - in a resounding phrase of
does he think, in the present secularist climate, that Dr Cranmer, which Ordinariate Catholics can never
denominational schools will be allowed to survive? forget - one of ’the causes for which matrimony was
When the Church of England seems no longer to know ordained’.
what its church schools are for, and the original ideals
of the National Society have got lost in the Erastian
If the Church falters or fails in its obligation to assist
fog, the secularists have a point.
parents in that essential task, then it is tacitly admitting
that the Faith is neither necessary nor true.
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